Today's mobile devices provide users with a tremendous amount of portable functionality. For instance, smartphones, tablets, laptops, and so on, enable users to perform a variety of different tasks without being tied to a particular location. While providing such functionality in a mobile form factor provides a great deal of convenience, it also presents many challenges from a device design perspective. For instance, due to their compact sizes, managing operating temperatures in mobile devices is considerably more challenging than in the traditional stationary device scenario.
While designers have found ways of managing temperature inside of mobile devices to protect their hardware components, a mobile device typically does not monitor its external surface temperature. Since most mobile devices are designed to be utilized in direct physical contact with a user, such as a handheld device and/or a laptop device, the external temperature of a mobile device is an important consideration. If an external surface of a mobile device becomes too hot, for example, a user may experience serious discomfort or injury.